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Background: Frauke Petry (left), co-chair of Germany's Alternative for Germany party, and Marine Le Pen (right), of France's National Front. | wbur.org; inset: President Trump. | Alex Brandon/AP

PARIS Widening income inequality, in the U.S. and in other developed nations, threatens democracy, just as it did in the 1930s, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says.

Trumka issued that warning in early June at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) meeting in Paris. The OECD, which represents the most-developed nations in the world, invited outside experts to discuss the state of the world economy.

The AFL-CIO leader tied it to the state of world democracy.

Please, please understand, the alternative to addressing wage stagnation and the status of working people in the global economy is not more of the same elite-dominated globalization. The alternative is an escalating crisis where the false promises of authoritarianism and racism threaten to overwhelm the democratic ideal, he said.

Trumka did not name names of authoritarians on the rise, but political scientists cite French presidential candidate Marine LePen, right wing political parties in Europe, and Russian President Vladimir Putin as examples. Some cite authoritarian tendencies in U.S. President Donald Trump. The real problem, Trumka said, is the systems tilt against workers.

Globalization has meant rising inequality, whose cause turns out to be the decline in workers share of income and wages not keeping up with productivity, he explained.

That decline is due to the decline in workers bargaining power as a result of globalization being managed in ways that pit workers against each other. Underneath all of this is the decline of the percentage of workers belonging to unions and covered by collective bargainingThis is not my explanation. This is what the OECD says in its economic outlook.

And since the yawning gap between the rich and the rest of us is worldwide, it demands worldwide policy solutions to the root causes of this low (income) growth. Added Trumka: Stop trying to marginalize the crisis of low wages and stagnant growth as merely regional, or treat it as if it were somehow inevitable rather than being the product of policy choices.

But OECD and its member nations havent changed their policies, he chided. They still make excuses for the income gap. And OECD still issues recommendations to weaken collective bargaining, lower the minimum wage and weaken unemployment insurance exactly the policies that produced the serious economic and political crisis we now face. This schizophrenia really must stop if we are to solve it.

If the OECD nations, including the U.S., dont reverse those policies, democracy is endangered because its economic underpinning is endangered, he warned.

Anti-democratic forces are able to gain ground fundamentally because ordinary people believe democracy has come to mean inequality, poverty, and rising economic insecurity. A recent Harvard University public opinion study found only 30 percent of (U.S.) people born since 1980 think democracy is necessary for a good society, and 24 percent think democracy is harmful.

This is precisely why we must not allow the policy debate to become one between neoliberals and authoritarians. We must have a humane economic vision AND a human political vision. That requires rebuilding the collective power of working people, both in the workplace and in politics, Trumka said.

In a world of global corporations and big data, of Nissan and Uber, collective power is the only form of empowerment that actually exists for ordinary people.

The OECD ministers, meeting in Paris, agreed with Trumka on the widening gap between the rich and the rest. But they said globalization and technological change cause it.

They also didnt mention its threat to democracy or to workers. And they didnt endorse worker power through unionization or any other way as part of their package of solutions.

Instead, they said OECD nations, including the U.S., should enact policies that support skills, innovation, long-term investment and inclusive growth.

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I didnt think it was a great day for the media, said Caddell. However, if you watched some of the other cablenews networks, youd think this was a disaster for Trump. It was anything but. He went on to call out the media for pursuing a political agenda, as opposed to the truth, saying that media today is actually a danger to democracy.

The media really took it on the nose, he went on, pointing out that Trump was not lying about the three times he claims Comey told him he personally was not under investigation. How come that didnt leak out? That is an interesting question because enough people knew on Capitol Hill, and it tells me that it was the media. And this was really the chilling part, that they have theirnarrative agenda, that Trump is in collusion, Trump is this, and Trump is that, and hes under investigation. They did not want to challenge that narrative.

They werent reporting facts, continued Caddell. They were reporting sources who would give them statements that would contribute to their anti-Trump narrative. This is not a press. This is a propaganda machine. Its full speed against the president.

Caddellsaid he could turn to almost any network and predict itscoverage, If Trump walked on water, theyd say he couldnt swim.

They are so negative, as they were in the campaign, he went on. They havent let up, and they have invested themselves in a political result, not in telling the truth, and that is a danger to democracy.

Caddell said the press has damaged the very institution of the press by having decided to bring down a president versus report the truth, and Democrats are falling right into the path with them.

As for Trump and Comey, Caddell said, Comey basically vindicated him, first of all, on the question if there was collusion, or even on the Flynn matter whether there was obstruction, and it just doesnt hold, he continued. Obviously, Mueller wouldnt let him testify if he thought there was an obstruction case.

Added Caddell, Comeys behavior is just bizarre. This man really believes that he is a demigod when it comes to the law. He keeps changing the goal lines. His weakness, which he confessed to, but I think it was more a device than a critical perception, whether it was with Loretta Lynch, when she asked him to conform to the Clinton campaign, which I thought was a revealing comment and opened up a lot of other doors, when he talked about his own leaking, volunteered how he had leaked and what he had done with those memos, I thought that was just really strange. His criticism of the media, he basically denied their stories. Hes basically a very angry man, and I thought the White House handled Comey terribly, but thats neither here nor there.

Caddell stated, He was the one in the meetings, and he never raised a protest, and then he said a sentence that I was stunned by. He said, Idid it because I gavemy friend the memo to give to the New York Times because I thought weneeded a special counsel. Heres a man who wouldnt have a special counsel or wouldnt even investigate the IRS stuff, a person who didnt do it with Hillary Clinton, particularly in terms of the Clinton Foundation, and yet it was pointed out to him by a couple of the senators, you know, basically he gave her a whitewash. He wants to do this with Trump. I thought that was devastating and puts him in a very precarious place.

Caddell added, It chills me to think that this person was running the FBI.

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Flying blind.

Thesocial mediagiants based in the U.S. may soon face a new attack in Europe: There's a perception among activists and officials that the basis of their business model -- targeted advertising -- can be a threat to democracy.

In a speech on Wednesday, Commissioner Margrethe Vestager -- who, as the top European Union antitrust official, has been thenemesis of U.S. tech companies such as Google and Apple-- laid out her problems with the way social networking changes people's political behavior. Oneof her complaints is familiar and much-discussed: Facebook and its peers tend to sort people into political and ideological filter bubbles and silos, destroying, as Vestager sees it, the chances of meaningful debate. The other has received less media attention. It concerns political ads and, generally, campaigns' social messaging. Vestager:

If political ads only appear on the timelines of certain voters, then how can we all debate the issues that they raise? How can other parties and the media do their job of challenging those claims? How can we even know what mandate an election has given, if the promises that voters relied on were made in private?

There are reasonable arguments against both of Vestager's complaints. Long before social networks, people have grouped together on the basis of compatible views; confirmation biases, too, are as old as human society. The social networks merely reflect reality and make it more palpable. As for targeted messages, old campaigning instruments, such as direct mailings and phone calls, also delivered private messages to potential voters, and the media usually parsed them -- just as they parse modern campaign activities on social platforms. It's actually become easier because everyone is on Facebook and Twitter.

Vestager, however, is on to something. The old tools allowed for rather generic targeting -- say, by voting or campaign donation history. Modern campaigns try to target messages using people's private data or even psychological profiles created on the basis of social network and browsing activity. That's not necessarily effective -- I've argued that it isn't -- but it means certain voters get ads and messages that they wouldn't have chosen to receive.

Imagine I'm a social media junkie for whom Facebook is the primary news source, as for about two-thirds of Americans and a fifth of Europeans.I see a political ad because someone -- or, most likely, an artificially intelligent entity -- has profiled me in a certain way, not because I made a donation to a certain party or voted for a specific candidate in the last election.Unless another algorithm profiles me differently, I don't see the other parties' responses to the content with which I've been plied. I have no idea what the party that advertises to me has promised people in different target groups. I have less of an idea of the campaigns parties are running than if I watched TV like a 20th century voter.

At the same time, Facebook doesn't release any data about what campaigns do on its platform. In a countrythat hasn't removed campaign spending limits as the U.S. effectively did withCitizens United, that makes it hard to check what they spend on ads. Facebook's position is that it's the campaigns' responsibility to follow their countries' laws, and that a user has full control over which ads are shown to him or her. The former is irrelevant to the task of checking campaigns' self-reporting. Thelatteris only true to a degree: On Facebook, you can opt out of certain ads, but algorithms will still decide how they will be replaced.

In the run-up to Thursday's U.K. election, a group called Who Targets Merecruited 10,000 volunteers to install a browser extension that registers targeted messages, ranging fromFacebook videos to Google search ads. The group calls them "dark ads" because they are so hard to monitor: They've been targeted to specific local constituencies, gender and age groups.

Last year's U.S. election led to pressure on the social networks to crack down on fake news stories and the bot networks that spread them. Facebookresponded byintroducing well-publicized mechanisms for reporting likely fake stories and having them fact-checked. During the recent French presidential election, it said it also suspended 30,000 fake accounts to stop them from spreading false stories.None of that really fixes the filter bubble problem -- people will still believe what they want to believe, and if they mistrust mainstream media, they are likely to discount fact-checkers' efforts, too. So the pressure is still on for a more pertinent response, but it's not clear what that could be -- short of having human editors remove stories deemed to be fake, something the networks will resist because it's contrary to their self-perception as neutral platforms.

If a regulatory backlash starts against political targeting, though, it's clear what the social networks might be required to do. Regulators could order them to disclose what messages campaigns are using and how much they are paying to circulate them. In an extreme scenario, they could even ban paid political advertising on social networks, arguing, as Vestager did in her speech, that politics is different from business, so rules for targeted messaging should be different to protect democracy.

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In a manifesto earlier this year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote about moving relationships and social structures formed on the networks into the offline world."Thesechanges have been so fast that I'm not sure our democracy has caught up," Vestager said in her speech. One can be sure European regulators will choose to slow down the development of Zuckerberg's vision rather than rewrite campaigning rules to catch up with it.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mike Nizza at mnizza3@bloomberg.net

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Democracy Never Faced a Threat Like Facebook - Bloomberg - Bloomberg

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Communism Victims Remember FrontPage Magazine Do not listen to what the Communists promise, just watch their actionsSearch the truth by talking to victims of Communism, recently warned Truc Brown, a refugee from Vietnamese Communism. Available for public appearances in the Anticommunism ...

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Victims of Communism Memorial / Wikimedia Commons

BY: Faith Bottum June 9, 2017 4:11 pm

The Truman-Regan Medal of Freedom was awarded to Matt Laar, the former prime minister of Estonia, at the 10th Annual Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom and Roll Call of Nations Ceremony held Friday at the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Larr has worked for the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba, the Human Rights foundation, and the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial. He also founded the Unitas Foundation.

The award is given to prominent opponents ofcommunism and other forms of tyranny. Ithas previously been given to such figures as Pope John Paul II, William F. Buckley Jr., and Michael Novak.

This year, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation filled the square around the memorial with flower wreaths, each representing a country victimized by communism.

The memorial was dedicated by President George Bush in 2007 for "the more than one hundred million victims of communism" around the world.

The keynote remarks were delivered by Vytautas Landsbergis, the Lithuanian statesman and scholar. He spoke about how the horrors of communism remain, in some peoples minds, "no tragedy, only statistics" and how the struggle of communism and freedom is an "existential rivalry between humans." Venezuelan violinistWuilly Moiss Arteaga performedto protest the Maduro regime in Caracas.

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Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom Awarded to Former PM of Estonia at Victims of Communism Memorial - Washington Free Beacon